SHOWDOWN IN YUGOSLAVIA: FRIENDS IN NEED

SHOWDOWN IN YUGOSLAVIA: FRIENDS IN NEED; How Small Town Turned Out For Kostunica at a Key Time

By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: October 9, 2000

CACAK, Serbia, Oct. 8—
Townspeople here cheered their mayor today in the street and paraded a yellow bulldozer around the main square for the television cameras in celebration of their part in the revolt in Belgrade that secured their election victory and forced Slobodan Milosevic from power.

People from Cacak, one of the most determinedly anti-Milosevic places in Serbia, were at the core of the tide of people who gathered in the capital, Belgrade, on Thursday and overran the federal Parliament and state television station.

Velimir Ilic, the town's popular mayor and a well-known figure in the movement that opposed Mr. Milosevic, said two officers who were members of an elite police unit in Belgrade and two more in Cacak had helped to coordinate a mass defection of the police as the crowd, spearheaded by off-duty army paratroopers, rushed the Parliament building.

''It was a personal contribution from Cacak,'' said Mr. Ilic, 49, a broad-shouldered, energetic man who led 10,000 people from his town 60 miles north to Belgrade.

He was coughing badly -- he said he was still suffering from the canister of asphyxiating gas that a policeman shoved down the back of his track suit that day -- and said he had bruises on his arms and back from police batons.

On the table in his modest offices today, there was a huge basket of lilies from a local flower shop. The card read: ''Thank you for everything you have done for us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.''

Mr. Ilic, long a leading member of the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement until he fell out with its leader, Vuk Draskovic, said he had always urged concrete action in opposing the Milosevic government.

But he said Mr. Draskovic and other opposition leaders had dismissed his ''revolutionary ideas.'' But this time, he said, he headed for Belgrade determined to push for a confrontation.

''I was fed up with these long meetings,'' he said, ''where there's just talking and nothing happens and Milosevic stays in power. I wanted to do something. At a rally here the day before, I told the crowd, 'It's victory or death.' We were fed up living in a Milosevic state. We were sick of watching state Radio Television Serbia, and we swore we would march to RTS even if we got killed.''

He rallied a 12-mile-long column of cars and trucks and set off from Cacak at 7:30 in the morning for Belgrade. Among the workers, students and truck drivers, he had organized a core team of tough young men and, crucially, off-duty members of the police and the army, he said.

They took bulldozers and trucks to help break through police blockades and in case they needed to build their own barricades. For weapons they took three truckloads of stones, said Dragan Kovacevic, the regional chief of Mr. Ilic's New Serbia Party, who accompanied him at the head of the column.

Mr. Ilic said: ''We established a team of young professionals, paratroopers from the Yugoslav Army and young policemen, and we coordinated this with the most elite units of the Interior Ministry Police in Belgrade. We got martial arts experts and professional boxers to join us. We even had plainclothes police coordinating with nearby towns.''

The off-duty policemen used their walkie-talkies to give the demonstrators crucial warnings of police efforts to block the procession to Belgrade, he said.

That in itself caused problems, as some demonstrators accused them of being police informers. ''I had to address the people several times and tell them, 'The police are with us,' '' Mr. Ilic said.

On the march to Belgrade they tried to persuade the police to let them through and even join them. Once they were in central Belgrade, the paratroopers and tough young men -- along with members of Otpor, a student resistance movement, and even former paramilitaries in the crowd -- spearheaded the lunge for the Parliament building, he said.

That provoked a battle with the police, who fired tear gas and even opened fire on some demonstrators. That confrontation provided the stimulus and the huge crowd took on a life of its own, burning cars, Parliament and the television building, which had not been part of his plan, Mr. Ilic said.

But he said his personal agreement with two special policemen from Belgrade, and two from Cacak, had caused major elements of the police in the capital to join the side of the demonstrators. As several hundred thousand people converged in front of Parliament at 3 p.m. and started to clash with the police, his contacts refused orders to move against the demonstrators.

''At a certain moment they refused the orders of their superiors and were trying to persuade their colleagues too,'' Mr. Ilic said. He said a few influential men in the units had been on the anti-Milosevic side before the demonstration.

''They told us: 'Just keep on going. Sustain the pressure until 3:30 p.m., and then we'll get the order to charge and we'll refuse,' '' he said, jumping half off his chair with excitement as he recounted the story.

In fact, Mr. Ilic said, he was scared all along that his agreement with the police was some kind of trap. He had developed contacts with those men during the last few months, but as the election campaign proceeded, he came under heavy police surveillance, including searches of visitors and of his bodyguards' homes.

Already last year, during the NATO bombing campaign, he had to go into hiding after protesting that the army had brought antiaircraft weaponry into the center of Cacak. He was accused by the government of being a traitor and undermining the country's ''combat readiness.''

He took to the hills in southwestern Serbia and hid for 43 days in the woods, and even once in a haystack. When he returned home at the end of the war, he was greeted as a hero by a crowd of some 20,000.

For the last month, he said, he has not slept in his house for fear of arrest. Then one of the special police in Belgrade invited him to stay with him for safety.

''I thought it was a set-up,'' he said, but he accepted. It proved to be an important test of trust. Another test was a warning his police contacts supplied of orders they had to move into the Kolubara coal mines against striking miners on Wednesday. They urged Mr. Ilic to gather a large number of demonstrators to rush to the support of the miners and push through the police barricades.

Mr. Ilic said he had not told other leaders of the democratic opposition of his contacts with the police and paratroopers or of his plans for the big rally in Belgrade.

But once the Milosevic opponents were inside Parliament, he introduced the Democratic Party leader, Zoran Djindjic, and the former army chief of staff, Momcilo Perisic, to the paratroopers. ''I told them these men did it,'' he said.

And he warned that Mr. Milosevic remained a threat and his party could still fight back. ''It is not finished,'' he said. ''Milosevic is very dangerous. They are buying time and working intensively, and if they feel the moment is right, they could go on the attack.''